Thursday, February 23, 2012

Bo Ikeda #2.

Bo rips.

I was going to write up a little something on board sizes, but work has gotten too busy today so here's three paragraphs on wheels.

I did a little research on small wheels last night by digging through a bunch of old CCS and other assorted catalogs. The comments yesterday suggested that there were 38 mm wheels from Santa Cruz and New School. There certainly were so Heavy Metal Chuck and Lucas can trust their sense of recall about the existence of Bullet 38 Specials and New School Little Ceasars.

What I surprisingly discovered was that pretty much everybody had a 38 or 39 mm wheel in the late 1992 to mid 1993 time frame. I thought wheels bottomed out in the low 40s with only a few daring to go lower. A1 Meats, Alien Workshop, Birdhouse, Blockhead, Planet Earth, Powell, Race, Real, Santa Cruz, Spitfire and Stereo all cracked the 40 mm barrier. It went from one catalog having a couple in the 30s to the next catalog with a 30 mm overload. Now these were primarily CCS catalogs so I don't have an accurate sampling of World Industries related products because either Steve Rocco wasn't peddling his smut to them at the time or CCS didn't want it. There might have been a 36 mm Kareem Campbell wheel and a 101 wheel of the same size, but I didn't find anything yesterday. Feel free to send along a link if anybody out there does find something.

After all that set up, I found the magic number to be 37 mm. Stereo had a wheel called the Quarter Note at that size. Spitfire also had a 37 mm Fireball. An honorable mention goes to World Industries for making a 37.5 mm Daewon Song wheel. These would all have been from about the middle of 1993. Wheel sizes started to rebound after that and by 1994 things were getting bigger.